Organisation

Gilbert B. Rodman is the Chair of the Association for Cultural Studies. He is also an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, where his research and teaching focuses on cultural studies, media studies, popular culture, media technologies, intellectual property, and the politics of race and ethnicity. He is the author of Elvis After Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend (Routledge 1996) and one of the co-editors of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge 2000). His current research examines the social construction of race in the US, with a specific focus on multiracial identity, media representations, and public policy. He sits on the editorial boards of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Cultural Studies, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the founder and manager of CULTSTUD-L, an international listserv devoted to cultural studies that currently boasts more than 2500 subscribers from over 40 different countries.
[website]

Investigator and academic coordinator of the Programa de Investigación en Artes (Art Investigation Program) of the University of Veracruz. Doctor in Sociology from the University of York. Her investigational interests cover such different aspects as the composition of the artistic community, cultural management, cultural consumption, cultural politics, countercultural expressions, youth culture and inter-generational relations. She currently coordinates a Latin-American investigation of the impact of the cultural managers in local cultural communities, in collaboration with the University of Buenos Aires, the National University of Colombia, and the Catholic University of Valparaíso. She has published articles in magazines on a national and international level. She is the principal author of the book Uses of Time and Cultural Consumption in University Students. Soon to be published, compilations and co-editions: Culture and Development in Latin America: Actors, Strategies, Formations and Practices as well as the book Artistic Investigations: Poesies, Politics and Processes. She is member of the National System of Investigator, category 1; Latin-American representative in the Association of Cultural Studies; member of the editorial committee of the University of Veracruz; technical evaluator in the area of cultural administration/management in the Consejo para la Acreditación de Escuelas Superiores de Artes (Council for the Accreditation for Higher Education in the Arts). She is co-founder and active member of the citizen initiative “Observatorio Cultural Veracruz” (Veracruz Cultural Observatory).

Kris Rutten studied Comparative Cultural Studies and obtained a PhD in Educational Studies with the dissertation entitled “The rhetorical and narrative turn. Explorations in education”. He is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Educational Studies of Ghent University. His main research interests are new rhetoric, cultural studies, literacy studies, educational theory and qualitative research methodology. He was a visiting scholar at the Department of Education of the University of Bath (January, 2009), at the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education of the University of British Columbia (November-December, 2010) and at the School of Education/ Laboratory for Educational Theory of the University of Stirling (January-February, 2012). For international VLIR-UOS projects on capacity building he has been conducting workshops on Qualitative Research Methods in Mozambique and South Africa. He was the chair of the inaugural ACS Summer Institute on Critical Literacies.
[website]

Bassey Ubong holds the BSc (Hons) and MBA of the University of Nigeria. MEd. and PhD in Philosophy of Education of the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. At present on the faculty of the Federal College of Education (Technical), Omoku, Rivers State where he is also the Deputy Provost. He has presented papers at the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB) seminar at the University of Edinburgh (2010) and 2nd UNESCO World Conference on Technology and Development at the Ecolé Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland (2012) aside from conferences in Nigeria and South Africa. Attended the 1st Institute of the Association for Cultural Studies (ACS) at the University of Ghent, Belgium (2011) and is a member of the Association’s international Board. He has published papers in entrepreneurship, philosophy of education, and literary criticism. He has 18 published literary works in all the major genres used in Nigerian educational institutions at all levels as set texts (9 plays, 4 poetry anthologies, one science fiction, two collection of fables, two novels). The plays have been used for production and research up to the PhD level. Three of the works are published in the USA by Author Solutions Inc.
[website]

Rainer Winter is Professor of Media and Cultural Theory and Head of the Institute of Media and Communications at Alpen Adria Universitaet in Klagenfurt (Austria). He is Chair of the Section „Sociology of Media and Communications“ of the German Society of Sociology. In 2010 he taught as a Visiting Professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing and at Shanghai International Studies University. Since 2012 he has been Adjunct Professor at Charles Sturt University in Sydney. He is the author and editor of more than 50 books on Cultural Studies, including Die Kunst des Eigensinns. Cultural Studies als Kritik der Macht (2001, Second expanded Edition 2013), Global America? The Cultural Consequences of Globalization (2003; Chinese Translation 2012), Widerstand im Netz (2010), Der produktive Zuschauer (2010, Second expanded Edition), Die Zukunft der Cultural Studies (2011, Chinese Translation 2013) and Transnationale Serienkulturen (2013).
[website]